“Yes ma’am. What about taking in Fairfield?”
“You can leave sometime after lunch to go take care of that – we don’t take him until quitting time, anyway. But for the time being, whenever you’re not doing something else, Stefan wants you looking for Bronze in those videos.”
“Okay.” Ashton shook his head. “What is with all the security videos, anyway?”
“Oh, that. We had a crime wave through there about a decade ago or so,” Peterson explained. “Right before the whole Sandman serial killings started, actually. It proved damn hard to solve, because there were so few witnesses, and the burglars were pros. We did manage to round ‘em up and incarcerate ‘em, but we were left with the realization that the way that area is set up, there are just too many places where nobody much is gonna be around to see stuff go down. So ICPD made an offer to businesses along the arcade: If you want security on your businesses, we’ll install security cameras hooked to servers for the recordings – provided we get access for crime analysis. And they agreed.”
“Aha. That makes sense.”
“it does. Now run on; they’re expecting you. Park West entrance.”
Ashton arrived at the Imperial Park West entrance, checked in with Reception, and an Imperial Guard escorted him straight to the recording analysis team, who was just beginning their work on the security video recordings.
He sat in the back of the room and watched quietly, being allowed to enter VR with them when they took the analysis three-dimensional.
They were done well before lunch.
A grim Dominick Ashton rose and went in search of Stefan Gorski.
“So it was him?” Gorski asked.
“That, or he has a twin brother,” Ashton said. “If the pattern recognition algorithms don’t dump out Josip Bronsky, I’ll be shocked. I’ll also vote for firing the guy who wrote the algorithms.”
“And if we find the box, uniform, and weapon?”
“That’ll probably nail it.”
“Right. Never mind the modus operandi, because it was a double-tap with a .25 caliber airgun, just like your profile laid out. Were the analysis people sending the info over to the Marines at the spaceport?”
“What’s at the spaceport?”
“Oh, that’s right, you haven’t been in the loop on that. The contents of the trash bins were collected by the better part of a battalion of Imperial Marines, bagged and tagged per location, and taken to their facility at the spaceport. To look for the disguise and the weapon, we’ll need to go through the bags.” Gorski grinned. “Wanna go help?”
“Think it’ll take long? I have to be back to set up the team to take the DoD guy into custody…”
“Ooo. Lemme see. No, it’s barely past 10:30 in the morning, and with all the Marines on search duty, I doubt it’s going to take that long. Especially since, as you say, they’ve narrowed it to only a few bags. You should be back at the station by around one, maybe one-thirty.”
“Then let’s go. I wanna see this guy get taken down. It’s been way the hell too long.”
“You go ahead. I’ll meet you there if I can. I have to check in with Maia first.”
“Gone.”
As Gorski had predicted, inside about forty-five minutes, the Marines had found all of the pertinent pieces of evidence. And one of the biggest pieces was a .25 caliber airgun.
Ashton bagged and tagged as the items were found.
He was headed back to ICPD headquarters by half past noon.
As ordered, that afternoon Ashton went to the DoD Acquisition & Testing building with a large team of investigators from the department, to help him keep an eye out and ensure that their quarry was neither missed, nor snatched from under them…or worse, killed before they could take him into custody.
They were well in advance of Fairfield’s usual quitting time, and intel indicated that he was still in his office, so Ashton took the opportunity of placing his people in strategic locations to surveil the main entrance, which was also the one Fairfield always used, given all the others tended to be security airlock type portals. This would, he decided, ensure that not only was someone in position to see him, but no matter what he did, someone would also be in position to apprehend him.
More, he tagged the video security system on the building to let him know if Fairfield left through any of the other exits to the building, and ensured that he had team members positioned to cover those, as well, though they were secondary in attention, and he wanted those members largely focused on the main entrance.
Then they settled in and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
When fully an hour past Fairfield’s usual quitting time had come and gone and they had seen no sign of him nor gotten notification of his departure through other doorways, Ashton checked in with their intel, only to discover that Fairfield was not working overtime, and had indeed left his office at his usual time.
“Shit,” Ashton grumbled, not bothering to keep it to himself. “We missed him. Somehow, we missed him.”
“I swear, Nick, we didn’t,” Peter Rassmussen, one of his team, declared in VR. “Every damn one of us had our eyes peeled the whole time. He didn’t come out that door, I’d stake a year’s pay on it.”
“And I don’t think he came out one of the other doors, either,” Compton averred. “If he did, he disguised himself somehow, so even the pattern recognition didn’t catch him.”
“I gotta agree,” Roger Armbrand said. “Something else went down here that we don’t know about.”
“I just hope the damn bastards didn’t get to him before we did,” Ashton grumbled.
“We didn’t see anyone else on
